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#OpIlluminatusPiedPiper – Former police inspector Clive Driscoll was investigating a minister in paedophile Tony Blair’s government suspected of being linked to a paedophile ring before investigation was shut down from orders on high – household-name celebrity also named in list of 12 suspected abusers – Lambeth Council – Operation Trawler – Operation Trinity – Operation Care – Angell Road – Paedophile Aids victim Michael John Carroll was allowed to work with children in Lambeth despite being known to be a danger to children – children’s homes have been the playground for the rich & powerful

Former police inspector Clive Driscoll was investigating a minister in Tony Blair’s government suspected of being linked to a paedophile ring in 1998 when he was moved off of the case

One November day in 1998, a group of officials from Lambeth Council found themselves in an upstairs meeting room at Mary Seacole House, a concrete office block in South London.

It was the end of a lengthy business meeting. And they were sitting in stunned silence.

The reason? A few moments earlier, a local police inspector had just delivered several pieces of earth-shattering news.

First, he revealed that detectives working on Operation Trawler, an investigation into a paedophile ring suspected of operating in the London borough’s children’s homes, were focusing their inquiries on 12 potential abusers.

Second, he was prepared to name these people. Third, it contained the names of several high-profile members of the Establishment.

On condition of confidentiality, the policeman read out a list of the people his team was pursuing.

One was a Lambeth councillor. Another was a household-name celebrity. A third, perhaps most explosively, was a minister in Tony Blair’s government.

‘These are all only suspects at this stage,’ the policeman said, bullishly. ‘But I have reason to believe that further investigation will produce evidence that I can use to pursue court cases.’

In the room in Clapham High Street there was a sharp intake of breath. Labour-run Lambeth was no stranger to ugly headlines. For almost two decades, its name had been a byword for corruption, incompetence, and loony-Left political dysfunction.

Since the Eighties — when, under the Trotskyite leadership of ‘Red’ Ted Knight, it was dubbed Britain’s worst-run local authority — the Town Hall had spawned a series of criminal investigations and public inquiries, involving everything from fraud and blackmail to Mafia-style racketeering.

More recent years had seen Lambeth’s social services department rocked by a string of appalling sex scandals, some of which remained ongoing.

Yet even by those standards, the allegation that its premises were home to an Establishment paedophile ring, which included a member of the government, must have seemed so extraordinary, and so utterly unprecedented, as to be in a class of its own.

That, presumably, will have been the verdict at Mary Seacole House that day, where the gobsmacked council officials included several of Lambeth’s most senior social workers and executives, along with two of the borough’s solicitors.

Of 12 suspected child abusers on Driscoll’s list in 1998, one was a minister in Tony Blair’s (pictured) government

But in the weeks that followed, something very strange occurred. Far from leading to arrests and court cases, the policeman’s comments triggered events that saw him moved out of Lambeth and Operation Trawler brought to a halt.

In the process, those 12 suspected abusers, including the minister, were kept out of the firing line for more than 15 years. Things had started to unravel roughly three weeks after the meeting on November 26, 1998, when the police inspector, Clive Driscoll, was summoned to a meeting by his superintendent.

There, he learned he was being moved off the investigation, and transferred out of Lambeth, with immediate effect, due to what the superintendent opaquely called ‘orders from on high’.

Shortly afterwards, Operation Trawler was unceremoniously shut down, and its remaining staff transferred to other duties, again due to apparent ‘orders on high’.

Records of its existence, including paperwork identifying the 12 suspects, were transferred to police and council archives, where many crucial documents would subsequently disappear. Finally, that December, Driscoll, a highly-regarded police officer with two decades of service, found himself being disciplined for alleged misconduct, for having shared the high-profile men’s names in that original, supposed confidential meeting.

The formal complaint was eventually dropped, but not before he’d been forced to undergo a highly unpleasant disciplinary hearing. By the time he learned he was in the clear, all hope of continuing to pursue the investigation had vanished.

All of which meant that — by accident or design — the allegations he hoped to investigate were kicked into the long grass.

There they remained until early last year when, amid growing public concern about historic child sex offences and their apparent cover-up, Driscoll gave a brief interview about his experience in Lambeth to BBC2’s Newsnight programme.

Recently retired, Driscoll was by then one of the best-known detectives in Britain, thanks to his involvement in a string of celebrated cases.

He was respected, among other things, for leading a meticulous investigation into the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. Against extraordinary odds, he’d uncovered new forensic evidence (where several predecessors had failed) leading to the successful 2012 prosecution of the teenager’s killers Gary Dobson and David Norris.

Michael John Carroll was allowed to work with children in Lambeth, south London, despite being convicted of a serious sex offence

Driscoll had also spearheaded the delicate inquiry into Bachan Athwal, a Sikh woman from West London convicted in a 2007 trial of orchestrating the honour killing of Surjit Athwal, her daughter-in-law.

Given these successes, it was perhaps little surprise that the Metropolitan Police should this time around decide, in direct response to Newsnight, to take his comments very seriously.

The force announced its staff would be formally investigating both Driscoll’s alleged discoveries in Lambeth — and the manner in which he was removed from office — as part of Operation Trinity, a new inquiry focused on sex abuse in the borough in the Eighties and Nineties. That investigation continues.

In the meantime, Driscoll’s recollection of the Lambeth sex ring is set this week to make a sensational return to the news agenda with the imminent publication of his autobiography, In Pursuit Of The Truth.

It tells how Driscoll, an eccentric figure with a reputation (in some quarters) as a maverick, spent 34 years in the Met modelling himself on Sergeant George Dixon, the old-school TV bobby played by Jack Warner on the BBC show Dixon Of Dock Green.

Preferring to walk London’s pavements rather than sit behind a desk, he repeatedly turned down promotions to carry on doing old-fashioned beat work, and at times confounded colleagues with his unconventional approach to modern policing.

It is, for obvious reasons, the two lengthy chapters detailing his work in Lambeth that will be most keenly scrutinised, however.

In them, Driscoll, now 64, describes moving to the borough in July 1998 as a member of SO5, a specialist Scotland Yard unit focused on child protection.

On one of his first days, he attended a meeting at Lambeth Council where officials discussed the recent arrest, by police in Liverpool, of Michael John Carroll.

Carroll, then 49, was the former manager of a home for vulnerable children in Angell Road, Brixton. He’d been given that job by Lambeth Council in the late Seventies, despite a 1966 criminal conviction which made him a Schedule One sex offender, the most serious category, who is known to be a danger to children.

Even after Lambeth learned of that conviction, he was scandalously allowed to work with children in the borough until 1991. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he abused dozens of them.

After leaving Lambeth, Carroll moved to the North-West, where he’d abused more boys, leading to him, at the time of the meeting, facing around 70 criminal charges. He would admit to 24 indecent assaults, five counts of attempted buggery, five of buggery, and one act of gross indecency, on 12 boys, earning a ten-year jail sentence. One of his victims was aged just eight.

It wasn’t long, however, before Driscoll was told this abuse was part of a wider pattern. Moments after the July meeting, he claims to have been approached by a Lambeth social worker called Libby Blake.

‘Carroll was only the tip of the iceberg,’ she allegedly told him. ‘The children’s homes have been the playground for the rich and powerful for years.’

Driscoll was quickly moved off the operation, which was subsequently shut down by ‘orders from on high’

Driscoll was told about Steven Forrest, an assistant to Carroll who had died of Aids in 1992. He, too, appeared to have abused boys at Angell Road, and council staff were now concerned some of his victims had been infected.

Blake advised Driscoll to seek further details regarding the dark underbelly of the borough from a local councillor called Anna Tapsell, telling him: ‘She’s the only one in Lambeth who’ll tell you the truth.’ He spoke with Ms Tapsell and recalls: ‘What Anna told me was almost too horrific to process.

‘According to her, children from homes in Lambeth had been farmed out to paedophiles and other sexual predators.’ Whistle-blowers had been unable to stop the abuse because, she claimed, ‘they’re up against some very powerful forces’.

Indeed, Driscoll claims that Tapsell was subsequently visited by ‘Special Branch’ officers advising her against talking publicly about the alleged child abuse.

Undeterred, he instructed two junior officers to begin investigating potential abuse at Angell Road and other Lambeth children’s homes as part of Operation Trawler.

They started by interviewing a cross-section of council staff, care-home employees, and police colleagues from Liverpool, who were carrying out their own investigation of Carroll called Operation Care. These inquiries saw Driscoll managing to, as he puts it, ‘strike gold’.

‘I found someone who admitted they’d seen pornography changing hands on council property, which led to someone else saying there was a video doing the rounds featuring “prominent” people engaged in sexual activities with minors.’

He never discovered that film, but arrested a man who possessed a selection of other illegal pornographic movies, several of which appeared to have been made in properties belonging to Lambeth Council.

That man (whose name has been omitted from the book to avoid interfering with an ongoing police investigation) was jailed for four years. ‘There were recognisable faces in his pictures, both victims and perpetrators, and locations that could be traced,’ says Driscoll.

Elsewhere, he writes, an ‘anonymous informant’ passed on the names of three people he ought to take an interest in. ‘These weren’t witnesses or victims,’ he writes. ‘They were suspects. One of them was a Lambeth councillor. Another was a celebrity. And a third was a member of the government.’

By late August 1998, Driscoll was sufficiently confident about his operation’s progress to be prepared to confidentially share an overall list of ‘around a dozen suspects’ with two colleagues from outside the police force: a social services inspector and a senior member of Lambeth council. ‘Everyone in the room was happy,’ he said of their response. ‘I left and my work continued.’

Troubling: The Labour minister was kept out of the firing line for 15 years

Then, in early November, came the sensational meeting at Mary Seacole House. Driscoll was later shown official Lambeth council minutes of the meeting.

He was ‘surprised to note’, he writes, that ‘there was mysteriously no record’ of him having named his 12 suspects.

‘I then spoke to two social workers, who confirmed there had been a further meeting [after the one he attended] to discuss the minutes. One of the original men present had gone through saying “take that out … take that out … take that out”.’ The resulting document therefore told, he claims, a ‘very different’ tale ‘to the version I lived through’.

Driscoll was then, he says, dismissed from Lambeth a few weeks later by Superintendent Brian Tomkins, who allegedly told him: ‘I’m really sorry, Clive, but the orders come from on high.’

Operation Trawler was closed down shortly afterwards, and its investigations were taken up by a different Met Police inquiry, called Operation Middleton. ‘They managed a handful of arrests over a decade,’ says Driscoll. ‘None of the major players from my list featured.’

As to the subsequent disciplinary complaint against him, he adds: ‘The case against me was eventually dropped — not that I was told at the time — moments after I was officially moved from Lambeth.

‘I couldn’t help feeling that it had been designed to halt my investigation long enough until other people were successfully put in place.’

Many readers will doubtless agree. Yet some others may, for entirely understandable reasons, feel inclined to question this and some of the other more sensational claims on these pages.

After all, most of the more controversial aspects of Mr Driscoll’s memoir appear to be unsupported by surviving documentary evidence.

He does not retain the correspondence he was sent regarding the disciplinary complaint. Neither has he produced any paperwork recording the interviews, meetings and conversations he cites in great detail in the book.

Most importantly, perhaps, he does not elaborate on what evidence he had actually compiled against either the Blair minister or other members of the alleged Establishment paedophile ring.

Driscoll doesn’t say whether he had been able to identify specific victims and first-hand witnesses of alleged abuse, or whether his list of high-profile ‘suspects’ was merely a collection of names of people about whom he’d heard convincing rumours.

A dossier of correspondence released this week under the Freedom of Information Act does reveal that ministers in Tony Blair’s government received briefing papers in 1998 about Michael John Carroll. But none of those documents contain any mention of a minister being under suspicion.

Not all of the people and organisations mentioned in Driscoll’s autobiography appear to share his exact recollection of specific events, either.

Libby Blake tells me that while she does recall meeting Driscoll in the summer of 1998, and telling him to contact Anna Tapsell, she categorically did not tell him that local children’s homes had been ‘the playground for the rich and powerful for years’.

Blake also denies describing Tapsell, in the same conversation, as ‘the only one in Lambeth who’ll tell you the truth’.

Theresa May: Westminster paedophile ring just tip of iceberg

Both those quotations by Driscoll are inaccurate, Blake insists, for two reasons: first they express opinions she did not have, and second they use expressions that she does not use, and has never used, in normal conversation.

Tapsell, for her part, denies ever having been visited by Special Branch officers, as Driscoll’s book states. However, she does recall receiving a similar visit from a superintendent working on Operation Middleton. She also remembers hearing that Driscoll was investigating a dozen high-profile suspects, including a minister.

With this in mind, she describes the rest of the text as ‘very authentic’.

Lambeth Council has yet to comment on the specifics of Driscoll’s memoir, but says it is ‘firmly committed’ to finding the truth about historic abuse cases that occurred on its patch.

The Metropolitan Police, meanwhile, will say only that ‘there remains an ongoing investigation by the Directorate of Professional Standards into allegations made by Clive Driscoll’. They do not dispute that he was moved from Lambeth in late November 1998.

One contemporary source who backs up important aspects of Driscoll’s version of events is Nigel Goldie, a former Lambeth social services boss.

He claimed this week to have had a ‘discussion’ with a government inspector about Driscoll in which they pondered ‘how we were going to handle this because of the huge political implications of a serving minister being investigated on suspicion of child sex offences’.

Weighing all this evidence, we can perhaps be entirely sure of just a few elements of this extraordinary tale.

First that at a Lambeth Council meeting in November 1998, Clive Driscoll did indeed announce that he was investigating 12 named suspected paedophiles, including a celebrity, a Lambeth councillor, and a Labour minister, on suspicion of abusing residents of local children’s homes.

Also, that around three weeks later, he was removed from the borough and his investigation was closed down. The rest, for now, is open to debate.

‘The truth is out there — and getting nearer,’ is how Clive Driscoll himself puts things.

‘If and when it does all come out, it could cause the biggest shake-up of our country since Oliver Cromwell.’

In Pursuit Of The Truth by Clive Driscoll is published by Ebury on Thursday at £20. To order a copy at the special price of £16 (p&p free) until August 8 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808

The daughter of Bulic Forsythe believes her father may have been killed because he uncovered a children’s home vice ring involving powerful figures.

Bulic told a new witness, tracked down in a Mirror investigation, that he suspected vulnerable youngsters were being assaulted by an organised gang at one home said to have been visited by the Labour politician.

But days later Bulic, 42, was beaten to death in his flat and the case has remained unsolved for 21 years.

Documents reveal detective Clive Driscoll advised the investigation should be reopened when he found potential links to his 1998 children’s homes probe in Lambeth, South London.

But Mr Driscoll was removed from the case for naming the Blair minister as a suspect and Bulic’s murder file has not been touched for 14 years.

Kiddist Forsythe – born three months after Bulic’s murder and 21 next week – said: “Police must examine whether my dad was killed because of what he knew about child sex abuse in Lambeth and if it was linked to people in power.

“We know that he told more than one person he was going to expose wrongdoing in the borough shortly before he was murdered and that his killer or killers remain free.”

Firefighters burst into Bulic’s blazing flat early on Friday, February 6, 1993, and found his blood-soaked body.

The social services manager’s skull had been fractured by a heavy weapon.

Justice: Bulic Forsythe’s wife Dawn and daughter Kiddist

In the months before his murder, Bulic had told colleagues at Lambeth Council he was on the verge of exposing child sex abuse and corruption.

A new witness told detectives for the first time last year that a terrified Bulic confided in her shortly before his death.

Speaking after she was tracked down by the Mirror, the former Lambeth worker said: “Bulic said, ‘With what I’m about to tell you I’m taking a big risk.

“What if I was to say that council buildings are being used for child sexual abuse on a regular basis’.”

The witness added: “Bulic came to me a second time because South Vale [youth assessment centre in West Norwood] had closed and he asked me who had the keys.

“He said, ‘People are saying they are using it to make films’. He was very frightened about something and then he was murdered.”

Bulic died at the time of an internal Lambeth council probe into alleged sexual abuse in the housing department where he had worked.

The resulting report, obtained by the Mirror, details allegations of rape, sexual assault and the swapping of child abuse videos and violent porn within the council. It implicated senior Lambeth officers as well as police and local politicians.

The report, signed by chair of the panel Eithne Harris, states: “The murder of Bulic Forsythe was seen by some witnesses as a possible outcome for anyone who strayed too far in their investigation or who asked too many questions.”

Published internally in December 1993, it adds: “The panel heard evidence about BF [Bulic Forsythe] while he was working in Social Services, speaking to a colleague and telling her he was going to ‘spill the beans’.

“Three days later he was killed.”

This is not the witness traced by the Mirror.

Investigation: A Daily Mirror front page

It states: “BF had allegedly expressed his fear of [boss initials] to another witness who visited him.

“He appeared very frightened to the witness. The witness at this point appeared fearful”

The report describes the atmosphere in the department as “one of intense fear”.

Though the panel found no “direct link” between his death and work it said its evidence should be handed to police.

Bulic was last seen alive at 8.45pm on Wednesday, February 4, 1993.

A BBC Crimewatch broadcast five months later revealed that at 10am on the Thursday three official looking men were seen by a neighbour carrying files away from his flat in Clapham, South London.

Two more men were seen in a car behind the property at 2pm. His bedroom was torched at 1am on Friday and the oven turned on.

The daughter of a man allegedly murdered to prevent him exposing a council paedophile ring has told of her anger that a report on the abuse was ‘covered up’.

Kiddist Forsythe was born three months after her father Bulic was beaten to death in his flat, which was then torched.

Mr Forsythe, 42, was a manager at the housing department of Lambeth Council in south London, which is now the focus of an investigation into historic sex abuse claims.

Bulic Forsythe (left), a manager at Lambeth council, was killed shortly after he told colleagues he wanted to expose an alleged paedophile ring. His daughter Kiddist (right) says her family are determined to get justice

Trainee lawyer Miss Forsythe, 21, believes he was killed because he found out about the abuse and planned to blow the whistle.

She has now been shown a report from an internal 1993 council probe proving other colleagues knew about the paedophile activities.

It describes claims of rape, sex assaults and the swapping of child abuse videos. Lambeth staff, police and politicians are implicated. But the report was never published and was not handed to police at the time. Miss Forsythe said she was ‘shocked’ at its contents.

‘Some of the stuff in there is quite harrowing,’ she said. ‘I am angry – I think everyone should be angry, not just me because I’ve a personal interest.

‘For this to go under the radar for 20 years is terrible.’

Speaking of her father, she said: ‘From all accounts, he was a lovely, kind, patient man. It did seem he was proud of his work and wanted to do the right thing. So it seems he did know something, and he was getting ready to blow the whistle.’

Victims were taken to this Lambeth council housing department building in the 1980s and 1990s and abused in the basement, according to claims made in a report kept secret at the time

Mr Forsythe’s death in 1993 was the subject of a BBC Crimewatch appeal, which revealed three men were seen carrying files from his flat in Clapham the following day. His bedroom was later torched and the oven turned on.

His widow, Dawn, has said she believed someone ‘wanted to shut him up’.

John Mann MP, who investigated the claims in the 1980s, said he’s certain there was a cover-up and has urged any with information to come forward

The Lambeth report documents claim senior figures in the council were using its premises for the rape of women and children.

They allegedly used the basement of Lambeth’s housing headquarters because ‘sexual assault could be performed without fear of interruption’.

A senior staff member is accused in the report of watching material with ‘sadistic, bestial and paedophile themes’ which ‘may have been home-produced by staff or people with whom they associated’. A female employee reportedly claimed she was raped on council property alongside children and animals by senior figures in the council.

The report states: ‘The murder of Bulic Forsythe was seen by some witnesses as a possible outcome for anyone who strayed too far in their investigation or for those who asked too many questions.’ Three senior members of staff were sacked but no police investigation took place, despite the report recommending a criminal inquiry.

Dr Nigel Goldie, former Lambeth assistant director of social services, said yesterday he believed this was because of a culture of wanting to keep things ‘behind closed doors’.

‘People will be incredulous,’ he said. ‘How can it be that a report raising all sorts of issues of sexual abuse and a range of different kinds of rather weird practices could not have led to a more thorough investigation.’

The Metropolitan Police said it was considering the report as part of Operation Trinity, its investigation into alleged abuse at children’s homes in the borough.

Lambeth Council said it was ‘determined to do all we can to support this renewed push to tackle the issue, and ensure offenders who previously escaped justice are now held to account’.